A creative studio that staffs every project from a community of senior creatives.
Role: Webflow development, CMS architecture
Partner: The Story Shack (design by their in-house designer)
Stack: Webflow, HubSpot, Finsweet Attributes
What The Story Shack Needed
The Story Shack is a creative studio that builds a team for each client from a community of more than 150 creatives: directors, editors, producers, designers, copywriters and strategists. It works with brands from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
That puts a lot of weight on the website. It has to show range across very different work and make the studio feel like one team, even though the people change from project to project. Their in-house designer led the redesign, and I built it. Three things had to be true:
- The work had to be easy to browse by type. A brand looking for video production shouldn't have to scroll past a rebrand to find it.
- Every case study had to follow the same shape, so a new project could go up without anyone laying out the page.
- The team had to run it without a developer. Case studies, team members and copy change often, and none of them should wait on me.
The Architecture
Webflow, to meet the team where they are. The Story Shack is run by creative directors and producers, and Webflow suits how they already work: they see a change on the page as they make it, and publish without touching code. That's a different answer from JTB Imaginative's Astro and Sanity site, and it's the right one here.
Everything is a CMS collection. Every case study is an item in one Webflow collection with the same fields: the offering, project types, capabilities, a one-line summary, and three short sections, with the project film embedded from Vimeo. The community and leadership team are collections too, so adding a project, a creative or a new hire is the same kind of edit.
Filtering by project type. The Work page filters every project by 10 types, from Strategy and Branding to Livestream and Web, using Finsweet Attributes on top of the CMS list.
Forms that land in HubSpot. The newsletter signup goes straight into HubSpot, with Cloudflare Turnstile to keep bots out.
How It Turned Out
The team runs the site themselves. New case studies, team members and copy changes go live without a developer, which was the point.
The partnership kept going after launch. I also build client websites with The Story Shack, as the developer on their teams.